How did president-elect Barack Obama win the election? Not by transcending race, but because of his race, according to an article published by a pair of Massachusetts Institute of Technology political scientists in the Boston Review. Using exit-poll numbers, Stephen Ansolabehere and Charles Stewart III build an argument that “Obama won because of race — because of his particular appeal among black voters, because of the changing political allegiances of Hispanics, and because he did not provoke a backlash among white voters.”
Crucial to their argument is that Obama barely gained among white voters compared to Sen. John Kerry in 2004; Obama won 43% of white votes, compared to 41% for Kerry. That slight gain didn’t tilt the election to Obama; instead it took blacks’ and Latinos’ rising share of the electorate, coupled with Obama’s big win among both groups — far bigger than Kerry’s. (Obama won 95% of black votes and 67% of Latino votes, compared to 88% and 53%, respectively, for Kerry.)
“Had the racial composition of the electorate stayed the same in 2008 as it was in 2004, and had whites remained as supportive of Republicans as they were in 2004, Obama would still have won the popular vote, albeit by a much smaller margin,” Ansolabehere and Stewart wrote. “But, had Blacks and Hispanics voted Democratic in 2008 at the rates they had in 2004 while whites cast 43 percent of their vote for Obama, McCain would have won.”
The numbers do indeed work out that way, with some caveats. McCain’s margin of victory given that scenario would have been just 0.3 percentage point, essentially a tie given the statistical error inherent in exit polls. Also, it’s questionable to suggest that Obama is solely responsible for the surge in black and Latino turnout; demographics play a role, too. In the three years before July 1, 2007, the last date for which population estimates are available from the Census Bureau, the white voting-age population increased by just 3%. The equivalent increases for blacks and Latinos was 5% and 11%, respectively.
And the Electoral College likely still would have tilted Obama’s way, even in the scenario presented in the article, at least according to one analysis of how the College favored the Democrats this election year. (It arguably also favored the Democrats in 2004, because Kerry could have won the Electoral College by winning Ohio, despite losing the popular vote by three million. Structurally, it’s less clear whether there’s a particular partisan lean to the Electoral College. “This pro-Obama advantage in the electoral college is interesting on its own as a separate note because political scientists and statisticians had argued earlier in the election season that there is a pro-Republican bias in the electoral college,” Ansolabehere told me.)
More fundamentally, the thing to keep in mind with analyses about which demographic group decided an election is that, given a small enough margin, victories can be attributed to a number of different factors. And that applies even to Obama’s seven-point win. For instance, it’s possible to make the argument that the election was decided by age instead of by race. Obama is 47, 25 years younger than his opponent. In November 2004, Kerry was 60, two years older than his opponent. Obama won the 18- to 29-year-old vote by 34 percentage points, and the 30- to 44-year-old vote by six points; Kerry’s margins among those two age groups were nine points and negative seven points, respectively. If voters in those two age groups had split among the two major parties in the same proportions as in 2004, and with all else equal, McCain would have won the election by a percentage point. Not to mention that a given voter’s decision may have nothing to do with his or her age, race or other demographic factors.